In July 2008, I and six other students from Cambridge University travelled to the North West region of Thailand in order to build and install a drinking water system for a remote Karen village that previously did not have access to one.

The team consisted of five Engineering students, a Chemist and a Geographer, all third years apart from one, who was a first year. The charity which organised the project is called ‘The Karen Hill Tribes Trust’ (KHT). This charity works specifically with the Karen people in Thailand, providing not only clean drinking water systems, but also sending teachers and funding for some local students to gain a higher level of education. As a brief background, the Karen people are Tibetan in origin, being found today mostly in Burma (7 million) and North East Thailand (400,000). Although originally nomadic, the Thai-Karen have settled mostly in small villages where they rely on their own farmland for the staple foods of rice and vegetables. Although the government does invest some money in basic services, they do not provide drinking water and even an electricity supply is not yet found in all villages.

KHT install roughly ten clean drinking water systems every year around the region, with their aim to give every Karen village its own supply as soon as possible. These systems drastically cut back the incidents of illness and death amongst the villagers due to water-based diseases, most notably typhoid and cholera.

Our team was reasonably small, only seven students, but our project was, I believe, fairly large. We were helping to build a water system in a particularly remote village near Mae Sariang, called Ban Hue Na. They had an existing system, built by the government, but it was poorly filtered and taken from below the rice fields so the water was full of chemicals.

We found the tanks whilst looking around the village and they did not look clean. The inspection hole at the top looked like it was leaking (taking the grime from the top of tank to the inside) and the concrete was cracking. In the last year six members of the village contracted typhoid and during the hot season there simply wasn’t enough water.

The trip up to the village was exciting; Penelope wasn’t exaggerating when she said it was remote. It had been raining and the trucks really struggled to get up the muddy hills, we had to put chains on the wheel of our van. It made me wonder how they get to the hospital in rainy season. (Unfortunately I found out the answer – they walk. It wasn’t very comforting).

When I first set out to go to Thailand as a volunteer, I did not really know what to expect. I had heard many stories about what it would be like, but I was then told that it would probably not be like that at all. That made me wonder a bit, but now I see that every person has his/her own personal experience of their time in Thailand, and it is this personal experience they share with people who come after them.

I had seen pictures of the place I was going to, so I had some expectations as to what it would be like to be out in the forest. I remember coming on the bus from Chiang Mai with expectations of the roads being worse than they are, and there was even a road all the way to my village! I was expecting a dirt-track.

My first encounter with the village and its people, I think will be with me for a very long time. Salahae took me to the village on a Sunday morning, and the first thing I noticed was the church, and a few huts and houses on either side of a dirt-track, which is the main street of the village. Salahae brought me to a house and said “This is your Mo, and this is your sister.” I turned around and saw two bright smiling faces. The whole atmosphere was so warm and welcoming, which made me very happy I was going to stay in this particular place.